Sunday, August 05, 2007

Charles Simic, the New U.S. Poet Laureate

(Photo by Richard Drew, AP)

As the AP reported Thursday, Charles Simic will be the new U.S. Poet Laureate. A Pulitizer-winner and emeritus professor at the University of New Hamshire, he remarked "I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn't speak English until I was 15."

Some of the greatest writers in English didn't learn it as their first language. I always think of Joseph Conrad, Vladamir Nabokov and Tom Stoppard, who use English with extreme precision (although Nabokov and Stoppard learned English at a very young age). I imagine the act of searching for the exact right words, driven by a keen mind and an artistic spirit, lends itself to that degree of care and eloquence.

...Simic cites as his first memory the 1941 bombing of Belgrade, when a next-door blast threw him from bed and knocked him unconscious. He was barely 3. His mother rushed in and scooped him up, Simic says, "and that's how my life sort of started." (That 3 a.m. episode would later become "Cameo Appearance," which begins, "I had a small, nonspeaking part / In a bloody epic.")

It was not war, however, or even love of words that brought Simic to poetry. It was instead the most sublime of adolescent reasons: girls.

Here the accounts differ slightly. According to the Post:

After immigrating to the United States at 16, Simic witnessed his buddies score dates by writing drippy love sonnets. He thought he could do better. "Turns out," he says, "I couldn't. The girls told me I bored them to death."

Whereas the AP reports:

Simic graduated from the same suburban Chicago high school as Ernest Hemingway, where he started writing poetry in high school to attract girls, he said.

"They were always surprised. `You wrote this for me?'" he said. "They're so surprised, they don't want to play literary critic at that moment."

So which one was it, huh? Surely a special prosecutor should investigate this! (In any case, Simic has been married to fashion designer Helen Dubin for 43 years and they have two children, so everything seems to have worked out.)

As to Simic's potential approach to his new position, Monica Hesse's piece for the Post leads with:

The way to become a poetry lover, according to the next U.S. poet laureate, Charles Simic:

Find a poetry anthology, any one will do, at the library.

Open it at random. Read aloud one stanza.

You won't like most of what you read.

But whatever you like, read that.

Don't worry about reading the English-teachery stuff at first, since most people's taste will organically mature. There's only one potential warning sign relating to poetry preferences, says Simic, 69: "If greeting-card verse brings you to tears at the age of 70, well, what can I say. You might be beyond help.

Hesse later qualifies some of the slight anti-intellectual shading of the last paragraph, and it would be nice to have a longer direct quotation from Simic versus her characterization — Simic is a professor of English, after all. Hesse's piece overall is appreciative but written in a breezy style. I suspect Simic's actual views are just common sense and in the spirit of Robert Pinksy's Favorite Poem Project, which encourages personal choice and connection. A good class will increase anyone's appreciation of a given art, but art doesn't need overly-authoritarian gatekeepers pre-approving someone's private viewing list, and no good teacher would employ such a model. One of the best aspects of exploring the Favorite Poem Project is seeing how many people, often from widely different walks of life, have a favorite poem or two. Those choices are highly personal and often extremely revealing.

The Poets.org entry on Simic captures this spirit beautifully with Simic's own words:

In his essay "Poetry and Experience," Simic wrote: "At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily."

In any case, while several people sing Simic's praises in the pieces linked above, the best testimony is his work itself. Here's a handful of his poems:

Eyes Fastened With Pins by Charles Simic

How much death works,No one knows what a longDay he puts in. The littleWife always aloneIroning death's laundry.The beautiful daughtersSetting death's supper table.The neighbors playingPinochle in the backyardOr just sitting on the stepsDrinking beer. Death,Meanwhile, in a strangePart of town looking forSomeone with a bad cough,But the address somehow wrong,Even death can't figure it outAmong all the locked doors... And the rain beginning to fall.Long windy night ahead.Death with not even a newspaperTo cover his head, not evenA dime to call the one pining away,Undressing slowly, sleepily,And stretching nakedOn death's side of the bed.

There's a wit to this piece, even black humor, but also compassion in creatively imagining Death as one more working stiff. Moving on, there's:

Late September by Charles Simic

The mail truck goes down the coastCarrying a single letter.At the end of a long pierThe bored seagull lifts a leg now and thenAnd forgets to put it down.There is a menace in the airOf tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard televisionIn the house next door.You were sure it was some newHorror they were reporting,So you went out to find out.Barefoot, wearing just shorts.It was only the sea sounding wearyAfter so many lifetimesOf pretending to be rushing off somewhereAnd never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.The heavens did their partBy casting no shadow along the boardwalkOr the row of vacant cottages,Among them a small churchWith a dozen gray tombstones huddled closeAs if they, too, had the shivers.

The poem features some striking imagery, creating a sense of forboding.

Meanwhile, consider Simic's words about "This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt," with this piece:

This Morning by Charles Simic

Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.I'm just sitting here mulling overWhat to do this dark, overcast day?It was a night of the radio turned down low,Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.I woke up lovesick and confused.I thought I heard Estella in the garden singingAnd some bird answering her,But it was the rain. Dark tree tops swayingAnd whispering. "Come to me my desire,"I said. And she came to me by and by,Her breath smelling of mint, her tongueWetting my cheek, and then she vanished.Slowly day came, a gray streak of daylightTo bathe my hands and face in.Hours passed, and then you crawledUnder the door, and stopped before me.You visit the same tailors the mourners do,Mr. Ant. I like the silence between us,The quiet--that holy state even the rainKnows about. Listen to her begin to fall,As if with eyes closed,Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart.

Lovely stuff. Finally, here's a short piece:

Watermelons by Charles Simic

Green BuddhasOn the fruit stand.We eat the smileAnd spit out the teeth.

Best of luck to Charles Simic in his new position, and bravo!

Update 8/6/07: NPR station KCRW has posted an installment of their show Bookworm from 9/5/02 featuring an interview with Simic.